Should cgi be banned from webservers?

[twentyfan]

I think that it should.

[furrycat]

I don't think it should. And I won't say my reasons either.

[bwkaz]

Yeah, I don't think it should be banned either.

CGI itself isn't bad, just a couple of the things some people do with it... For example, I believe vBulletin relies, when it gets right down to it, on CGI. So if you would ban CGI, then this board would have to go away.

[twentyfan]

Huh?

vbulletin is php/sql

[bwkaz]

Right, but php uses CGI. That's how it talks to the SQL server that's running on the same machine as the Web server, using data from the client.

CGI is just a way for web servers to run some sort of something on their end, and pass dynamically-generated Web pages to their clients. Any URL (AFAIK) that contains something like "?s=&action=newreply&threadid=70404" (just for example) is CGI. The ampersands separate CGI arguments, and the question mark separates the arguments from the CGI program / script that executes them. The stuff between the ampersands becomes $1, $2, etc., if you're doing your CGI in bash or perl. It becomes argv[1], argv[2], etc. if you're programming it in C.

There are other ways for clients to talk to CGI programs running on the server (like the HTTP POST command), but I've never looked at them enough to figure out how they work.

[Energon]

I think that as long as there's an admin with a head on his shoulders sitting at the server (or somewhere that he/she can get control if something goes wrong) and that's backing up on a regular basis, there isn't really any problem.